Turkey, and the thoughts and fiction of Jenny White

After collecting interviews last year about life in 1970s Turkey, a new project has begun to take shape that unexpectedly reaches into the present. Reading the interviews I was struck by a number of similarities with present-day Turkey and wonder whether there are certain key culturally powerful concepts around which Turkish society and polity orient themselves — and that help to shape them — in every era, regardless of the current ideological labels. The Gezi protests signal a brief rupture in this ongoing pattern. Perhaps a long view can help us better understand the present, rather than trying to parse the last few years on their own terms.

Here I link to an article I wrote in The American Interest (and excerpted in the previous post) and here to the video of a recent talk in which I further develop this new approach.

My new piece in The National Interestjust came out. It is an analysis of Turkish current events, seen from a slightly more anthropological angle than usual. I identify repeating themes and patterns that underlie Turkish society and politics. I first encountered these while doing new research last year into Turkey in the turbulent 1970s (thanks to Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies for supporting the research). These insights have pointed me in new directions.

Turkey’s turn toward pugnacious autocracy over the past few years has caused consternation in Washington and European capitals. Some pundits blame it on the rise of Islam in a country that previously had been ruled by secular Kemalist governments. Since 2002, the Islam-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been elected three times at the national level with an ever-greater percentage of the vote. In the 2014 local elections, too, it neared 50 percent. As the party has deepened its hold on Turkey, it has felt more secure in pressing what many assumed has been its agenda all along: authoritarian rule and the Islamicization of society.

This view ignores two important things: that Kemalist governments tended to be tutelary, illiberal democracies shepherded by an intrusive military; and that during the decade after its election, the AKP, led by former Prime Minister and now President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, transformed Turkey into a liberalizing, internationally engaged, economic powerhouse that had the respect and ear of the world’s leaders. If one simultaneously exaggerates the successes of Turkey’s Kemalist leaders and the recent failures of the AKP government, distortion is bound to result, and one is left unable to really account for the seeming knife-edge turns in Turkey’s political character.

But the error goes deeper than that. The Islam-secularism dichotomy, virtually the only framework most Western observers use in trying to grasp things Turkish, is no longer a useful diagnostic (if it ever was). We are seeing instead a recurrent cycle of conceptual patterns and associated roles—those of the “bigman”, selfless hero, and traitor—that have long characterized and destabilized Turkish political culture. These roles and their interactions are driven not simply by competing ideologies, but by on-the-ground rivalry between network hierarchies and a general fear of social chaos.

The most recent official unemployment statistics for October 2014 have been released by Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK): official unemployment rate is 10.6 percent, non-agricultural unemployment rate 12.7 percent. You can read a detailed news account of the report here. This figure has remained more or less the same over more than a decade, despite a booming economy, which is now contracting. In other words, while a new middle class has emerged, the poor have remained poor. The only trickle-down has been the customary distribution of resources through family, patronage, charity, and some social services. The family remains most people’s social safety net.

What is most alarming is the analysis of the latest unemployment figures. The devil is in the details. For instance, nearly one fourth of the officially unemployed are college graduates, more than half (54%) of them women.

51 percent of the officially unemployed do not have a high school diploma, university graduates are 24 percent. Regular high school graduates total 11 percent, as do vocational high school graduates. The illiterate unemployed are 3 percent.

Too many young people are graduating from new institutions with low quality education. Since 2006, 51 state universities and 48 foundation (private) universities were set up, many in the provinces. At the end of 2014, there were 176 universities, 104 of them state and 72 of them foundation institutions. Between 2006 and 2014, the national quota of higher education students was increased 83 percent. The Development Ministry’s 2015 Program points to the increasing numbers of students looking to change schools and graduates seeking a second university education show the lack of quality in the system. I am reminded that a couple of years ago (I can’t remember the date and details malesef) a Turkish trade institution planned to ask the government to issue special visas so they could hire IT specialists and other technicians from India, arguing that they are unable to run their businesses in Turkey because there are no people with suitable skills for them to hire.

Armed fighting has broken out again in southeast Turkey between the Kurdish PKK and Huda-Par, resulting in two deaths. Given that the AKP government is supposed to be negotiating peace with the PKK, we may well ask who or what is Huda-Par, which appears to be a far-right Islamist organization, one of many armed factions of various stripes that make up the Turkish fringe. But they’re more than that and evidence of another dangerous game being played blind in Ankara (read to the end of the post below).

I’m repeating below my post from November 22, 2013 (original here) in which I trace the ancestry and close relatives of Huda-Par, which had just come onto the political scene.

Here’s the post:

Turkish Hizbullah is back — in a new guise as a political party, Huda-Par. Hizbullah (not related to Lebanon’s Hezbullah) has been around for a few decades, wreaking havoc of one kind or another. I’ve covered it in this blog in relation to extra-judicial murders of prominent Kurds in the 1990s (in contract to the Turkish deep state), then a murderous rampage across the country killing and viciously torturing Kurds, Islamists and others, including women, and videotaping the torture sessions. The state finally cracked down on them, killing their leader in a shootout in 2000, closing their safe houses, unearthing the bodies in their back yards, and bringing the rest of the pack to trial. But despite all the evidence of the video tapes and bodies, the judiciary sat on their appeals for ten years until the time was up and they were by law required to be released (people accused of insulting Ataturk or writing about Kurds, by contrast, were assured of receiving speedy and lengthy sentences).

In the meantime, Hizbullah reemerged in civil society sheep’s clothing in a series of associations of slippery provenance, some allegedly financed by Iran, holding demonstrations with anti-secular, anti-Ankara, and anti-Israel themes (with distinctive Iran-style headbands, flags, and women in black charshafs), and possibly involved in the Mavi Marmara incident. I made an attempt to connect the dots between some of these unsavory associations here and here. Hizbullah’s umbrella organization Mustafaz Der (Association of the Oppressed) was closed down by Turkey’s Supreme Court in May 2012.

In December 2012, Hizbullah established a new political party, Huda-Par (Party of God). In a June 2012 interview with Sidki Zilan, unofficial spokesman for Hizbullah, he laid out the aims of the planned party. He saw this as an opportunity to grab votes from AKP, which he said attracted Sunni Zaza Kurds, and the BDP, which attracted Kurmanci Kurds (with Alevi Kurds voting CHP). The party seems perfectly happy to institute sharia law in Turkey. “We are Muslims before all else, but we will take note of the people’s wishes,” Zilan said, when asked about sharia. “And the people will no doubt cleave to Allah’s path.” No doubt.

Huda-Par sets itself against the secular Marxist-derived PKK in a rivalry that has already drawn blood, potentially starting a turf war between Islamist and nationalist Kurds just at a sensitive time in the AKP-PKK peace process. From The Economist‘s article about the new party.

Tensions between Huda-Par and the determinedly secular PKK have been bubbling ever since the Islamists announced they would be taking part in municipal elections in 2014. Last month the PKK accused Hizbullah of attacking mourners in the town of Cizre on the Iraqi border. In reply, Huda-Par complained that PKK vigilantes had repeatedly targeted its offices…

After PKK youths prevented Huda-Par volunteers from distributing leaflets on November 2nd, gunmen stormed a wedding attended by supporters of the pro-PKK Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), killing one guest. One of the assailants, who were arrested last week, was identified as a Huda-Par member and former Hizbullah militant.

I suggested in 2010 that Ankara’s turning a blind eye to Hizbullah’s activities in all of their guises was a dangerous game, putting the AKP in bed with Islamist extremists. Given what is happening now with al-Nusra and other Qaeda-linked groups operating freely on the Turkish-Syrian border in a proxy rivalry between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Iran-funded Shiite groups, the fact that an Iran-linked former terrorist group has just started a political party in Turkey can’t be good news.

I want to share with you an article I just published in Current History. The December 2014 edition of Current History has a collection of articles on the Middle East by prominent scholars that give excellent analyses and updates for different countries in the region.

It now appears certain that Turkey has provided military and medical assistance to ISIS (now Islamic State or IS) fighters over the past couple of years, allowing them refuge in and easy transit through Turkey to Syria. The Turkish IHH organization played a prominent role in this. I have written about IHH on this blog before, here and here, tracing its origin and links with intolerant Salafi-style Islam (particularly vicious in its IS incarnation — even al-Qaeda distanced itself from ISIS because it was too brutal!). Last year, I wondered how resistant Sufi Turkey was to the Salafi virus.

Since the recent announcement of IS, its wildfire-like spread throughout Syria and Iraq, and its threats and sometimes incursions into adjoining countries, the Turkish government appears to have gotten with the program. There is almost no country in the region that hasn’t lined up against IS, including Iran, since IS has threatened to destroy the major Shi’a shrines in southern Iraq, and Saudi Arabia now that IS has threatened to blow up the Kaaba. Its success has attracted thousands of foreign fighters from Europe, Canada, the US and elsewhere, making the plethora of battle-hardened jihadis with EU and US passports a major international security threat.

But like Saudi Arabia, where the state claims not to support terrorism while private Saudi foundations and donors dole out vast amounts of money to support Salafi expansion around the world, Turkey has two heads (and I don’t mean the “parallel states” of Erdogan and Gulen): 1) the official government/state and 2) cats’ paws like IHH, which the government can disavow formally, but informally support and use for its own purposes. The new old Deep State (the old one was kept busy assassinating Kurdish leaders, but new wars make new friends).

Behind the scenes are competing Jeckyl and Hyde institutions that both fund and undermine these activities (as for instance the police trying to stop a truck shipment of weapons into Syria, but being pushed aside (and fired for doing their duty) by Turkey’s secret service MIT). The focus on Gulen as the ‘parallel state’ is a red herring that draws the eye away from the Salafi switcheroo. Here is an article by David L. Phillips that makes the argument that Turkey, in one of its manifestations, is still supporting IS. Not that IS needs their support anymore!

In this incredibly disturbing video (and accompanying article in Hurriyet Daily News) a reporter embedded with Islamic State documents their propaganda/brainwashing activities, aimed at young boys. One IS member threatens on camera that if the apostate Turkish government doesn’t turn the Euphrates water back on, which Turkey has blocked with its dam, IS will come to Istanbul and turn it on from there. He is quite explicit that this is a threat. Hello, Ankara?

Surprise, surprise, the article and video do not appear in the Turkish edition of Hurriyet. Instead, the newspaper is a ragbag of half-clothed women, sexy stories, car accidents, and crime. There’s a photo of some “volunteer Peshmerga” Kurds ready to fight ISIL (not IS — the announcement of the self-styled expansionist ‘caliphate’ seems not to have penetrated the Turkish imagination). And that’s all the news from Iraq and Syria, the festering war of unspeakable brutality, misogyny and genocide that respects no national entity, including the Turkish government. IS is a virus infecting all the neighboring countries and destroying whatever culture and history it touches. Given Turkey’s love-affair with its own national identity and past, it seems beyond belief that it is not inoculating itself and its citizens against this imminent threat.

The biggest danger to the region — including Turkey — and arguably the world at the moment is not Russia’s expansionism or the Israel-Gaza conflagration, but Islamic State (IS), formerly ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). IS has become so powerful that it now controls entire swathes of Iraq and Syria and has unsuccessfully attacked the borders of Jordan and Lebanon. It has threatened Saudi Arabia. And now it has allowed a public face to emerge in Turkey with a mass open-air prayer on the outskirts of Istanbul of mostly Turkish men in robes and long beards. The sermon praised the jihad and wished it success. Turkish youth are joining IS across the border, and coming home radicalized. The Turkish government’s attempts to muzzle the media about this Wahhabi radicalization within its borders means that the threat has not yet been internalized — or acted upon. Wahhabi Islam until recently has had only a tiny footprint in the Turkish Islamic pantheon; this is a major change.

Given that IS hopes to establish a caliphate that includes ALL Muslim countries, it is clear that Turkey is on its radar screen. Why is this important? Because in taking Mosul, IS became extremely well-armed and very wealthy. It had access to hundreds of millions of dollars and gold bullion in Mosul’s bank (while it isn’t clear whether they looted the bank, it is clear that they have found financing) and captured advanced equipment left behind by the US, including a Blackhawk helicopter, Stinger missiles, and howitzers, as well as some planes. Since its successes in Iraq and Syria, it is reported that thousands of foreign fighters have flocked to join IS. Many of them are European, American, and Turkish, drawn by jihad romanticism or even the lure of loot and power (much like the Crusades that, under cover of religion, allowed Europe’s disinherited younger sons to amass a fortune and gain territory to rule). The fact that there are now IS members with EU and US passports has spooked Western intelligence agencies. And these radicalized young men will be going home and bringing the jihadi virus with them.

What is also important to realize is that IS is brutally massacring anyone not deemed to be Sunni enough, including Shi’ites, Yazidis, Kurds, and Christians. They are busily gunning down women and children, crucifying people, decapitating them, stoning them to death, all in the name of a strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islam that may or may not have roots in actual Islamic jurisprudence. The pattern has been, particularly in Africa, that jihadist groups spring up and then apply regional custom or even wholly invented “laws” to formulate their Islamic state. In this dystopian fantasy, women are targeted and the jihadists are rewarded with power and access to sex and money, all justified by “Islam”. As the leader of Nigerian Boko Haram announced after kidnapping 200 girl students,

“I abducted your girls. I will sell them in the market, by Allah,” a man claiming to be Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said in a video first obtained by Agence France-Presse. “There is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell. He commands me to sell.”

IS has destroyed age-old shrines of all religions in the region, including Muslim, and threatened to blow up the Kaaba in Mecca and the major Shi’ite tombs in southern Iraq. (Iran is already mobilizing militarily to intervene should IS get near them.)

ISIL is an al-Qaeda franchise (although al-Qaeda apparently cut its ties with the group in February 2014 because ISIS was too brutal and “intractable”) that grew out of a motley collection of armed Sunni groups in Iraq that supported themselves primarily through extortion and kidnapping. There they gained the support of Sunni leaders who resented their treatment by Iraq’s Shia-dominated government. The groups were attracted to the fight in Syria against the government of Bashar al-Assad, which was dominated by Alevi Muslims (associated with Shi’ism). Wisely, early on the US refused to arm the anti-Assad fighters because of the presence of such unsavory groups among them. After the Taliban blow-back in Afghanistan, the US wanted to know exactly who they were arming. And, indeed, before long the conflagration in Syria had turned from a civil war to a proxy war, where Sunni jihadist groups armed with money said to be from the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia and with at least logistical support from Turkey, fought against the Alevi-dominated government, but also against Shia Muslims in general. The Shia side was supported by Iran. Lebanese Shi’ite Hizbullah and Sunni Hamas also sent fighters — on opposite sides. ISIL joined the various factions under a single leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Now it is a proxy war between partisans of Sunni and Shi’a Islam, involving all the states in the region. Indeed, the anti-IS coalition makes for odd bedfellows: Iran, the US, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria. Iran and US have had to coordinate their anti-IS drones in Iraq. Turkey is only slowly getting with the program. It’s almost as if Turkey hasn’t recognized the threat to its own sovereignty.

Turkey harbored the Sunni jihadists for years as they crossed the border from Turkey into Syria to fight against the Assad regime, seemingly with no forethought about the blow-back on Turkish society or the effect of the long-term presence of foreign jihadis within Turkey. The Turkish government, after its attempts at friendly mediation with Assad had been spurned, turned into Assad’s bitter enemy. In Turkey, IS already begun to carry out violent attacks, including burning down a Shi’a mosque, and attacks on the headquarters of the Kurdish political party. The lack of government reaction to an openly pro-jihadist sermon in Turkey’s biggest city seems to ring no alarm bells with the AKP. If the Turkish public knew about it, I like to think that most pious Turkish Muslims would react negatively, that this is not “Turkish” Islam, and grow concerned. But with the government’s news blackout and inaction, they won’t know what hit them until it’s too late.

This post was updated: I was unable to find the report on the Development Ministry site, but I looked up the lowest poverty threshold for 2012 on TUIK (Turkish Statistical Institute): 3582 TL (2012 was the year they changed to YTL). The poverty line is calculated at $2.15 purchasing ability or $4.3 a day per individual.

Turkey’s Development Ministry issued a new report on the distribution of poverty across Turkey. 16% of the population is poor, defined as a 4-member family living under 4515 TL month. They take no vacations and have very little access to technology like the Internet or even cellphones. The poverty rate spikes in the east where in some provinces 13-14% of the population is poor, fewer than 4% of the poor have computers (compared to 42% in Istanbul) and 1% have Internet. It is noteworthy that even in Istanbul the poverty rate is a shocking 10% (I’m rounding off the numbers; it’s officially 9.6), that’s one out of every ten people.

You can download a 2014 comparative report here on poverty in Organization of Islamic Cooperation (COMCEC) countries that include Turkey. It’s also interesting that OIC seems to be the group against which Turkey’s Development Ministry most commonly measures itself in its reports. Turkey does indeed look good when compared to other Islamic countries. But why not also OECD? (I was also unable to locate the Turkish poverty study referenced in the news article on the ministry website.)

For those who are interested, this is what I’ve been doing on my sabbatical in Stockholm, a short essay describing my recent research on the 1970s in Turkey, a period that ended in a quasi-civil war and a coup. With the support of the Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies, I carried out interviews with a variety of people (from shopkeepers to industrialists, to leftist and rightist leaders and their followers, bystanders, men and women) who lived through that period in Turkey, as I did myself from 1975 to 1978. I collected very fine-grained accounts of their experiences at the time and oral histories of their lives (they were very young, so it’s often a fascinating coming-of-age story as well). I wanted to capture more than just the politics, so I also asked about personal lives and their environments (some were in a city, others in towns or rural areas), economic conditions, and so forth. I’ve just recently finished the interviews, so it will take time now to write it all up and analyze it and to read the secondary literature , like memoirs of the period, that I’ve collected.